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Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Michael Cohen: Twenty Down, Seven To Go!

MICHAEL COHEN:(from Comics Buyers Guide #1267, 27 February 1998)

Remember all those wonderful comics that were
coming out in December
1977? Who could forget such classics as Nova #18 or Freedom
Fighters #13? Two decades later,
people are still talking about Spidey Super Stories #32 and The
Human Fly #7. Well, those comics
may actually have their fans, but
the most signiﬁcant comic hook
that came out that year was pretty much ignored. Now, 20 years
later, however, it is considered a
classic.

Despite creator Dave Sim's
achievements with Cerebus -- and
there are many -- I would wager
that the majority of comics readers have never read a single issue
of the (so far) more than 225-issue
run. Perhaps they have heard
about that "weird aardvark comic
book" but have gone no further because they were told it was too
complex or they thought it was
just another funny-animal comic book or because it was black-and-white or because their retailer
never ordered copies in the first place.

Indeed, Sim has created a bit of
a dilemma for himself by attempting a comics project of this magnitude. How do you get new readers
to come on board in the middle of
a 300-issue (6000-page) graphic
novel! Convincing a non-Cerebus
reader that an epic story about a
talking aardvark is not only entertaining but is great art (which it
is) is a pretty hard sell. Even if
someone were willing to take a stab at the series, where should
he start?

With the ﬁrst issue, one would
think. Although a ﬁrst-edition
copy of that rare issue would set
you back a couple hundred bucks,
there are other alternatives. In
1988 Sim started publishing Cerebus Biweekly, reprinting the early issues in sequence, complete
with letter columns and all; these
might be found in back-issue bins for a reasonable price. A more daring move would be to go all out
and plop down $25 for a copy of
the ﬁrst "phone book", as these colossal compendiums are called. Titled simply Cerebus, it reprints
the ﬁrst 25 issues of the run. Another option would be to track
down a copy of an early reprint
volume, Swords of Cerebus, from
1981, which reprints issues #1-4.
Does that solve the "where do I
start" dilemma for the inquisitive
comics reader? Actually, no, because there is a debate on whether Cerebus #1 is the best place to
begin.

You wouldn't ask someone to start watching a movie in
the middle or jump into
Lord of the Rings with Chapter
12, so why does this question
present itself here? Because the
early issues of Cerebus, though
clever, funny parodies of the time
worn formulas of sword-and-sorcery (in particular, Roy Thomas
and Barry Smith's Conan the Barbarian comic hook adapting Robert E Howard's pulp hero) really give little hint of the depth and artistry that the mature, later works would have. It would be a shame if a potential reader for the entire series was turned off by issue #2, but it's certainly possible, especially if Sim's brand of humor is not your cup of tea.

But there's lots of wonderful
stuff in those early issues. Sim's
drawing and writing abilities
grew in leaps and bounds, as he had his wandering barbarian
aardvark encounter a wide range
of hysterically funny characters,
broad parodies of classic fantasy
archetypes: the wizard, the tavern
girl, the thief, the lady warrior --
and several of these early characters became part of the regular
cast of the strip.

There is a certain sentiment
prevailing among the Cerebuscognoscenti that issues #14-16,
known as the Palnu trilogy, are the place to start. Sim at this point had sloughed off broad parody and had established an art
style and stroytelling mode of his
own. In these issues, he began
laying the groundwork for what
would become the major focus of
Cerebus for many issues: political
machinations in the city-state of
Palnu and, in particular its ruler,
Lord Julius (Sims dead-on tribute
to Groucho Marx). From here, the
story start growing in complexity, planting plot seeds that had an
impact on later storylines. It was
around this time that Sim ﬁrst
mentioned his plan of having Cerebus run 300 issues, though few
took him seriously on that point.

Another reasonable jumping-on spot would be the second phone book, High
Society, collecting issues #26-50.
While the ﬁrst 25 issues were still
fairly episodic, Sim here started
dealing with his story, not as a series of funny episodes, but as a
truly major work, grouped as a series of self-contained storylines.
There was no coming in on the
middle of this one; it was a wild
ride, as Cerebus became involved in corrupt Iestian politics, and it
followed him through a nail-biting
election for Prime Minister. Along the way, Sim introduced amazing characters: the mysterious Regency Elf; The Roach, in the ﬁrst of his many incarnations; and Lord
Julius' niece Astoria, the brilliant
behind-the-scenes manipulator of
everyone and everything.

The Roach became Sim's vehicle for parodying whatever was
the current trend in super-hero
comics, since this schizophrenic
was always assuming new identities, such as The Cockroach (a Batman parody), Captain Cockroach (Captain America), The
Moonroach (Moon Knight), Wolveroach, Secret Sacred Wars Roach
(Marvel Super-Heroes Secret
Wars), normalroach (Jim Valentino's ﬁrst hero, normalman, published by Aardvark-Vanaheim),
Punisher Roach, and finally Swoon (Dream from The Sandman).

In High Society, Sim tackled a
topic rarely touched before in comics: finance. Much of the plot.
hinged on the manipulation of
money: taxes, tariffs, hiring
troops, buying elections, the economic juggling act that either
keeps a society flourishing or
plummets it into war and decay -- heady stuff for a comic book about
an aardvark. Sim also embarked
on innovative graphic storytelling,
most notably a run of issues printed sideways and a sequence in issue #49, wherein Cerebus' drunken state was reﬂected in the fact
that the issue must constantly be
rotated to be properly read.

High Society has all the elements in place that make Cerebus
a great work and is certainly a
suitable introduction to it, one
which will probably have the
reader panting for more, including
earlier issues.

Church & State dwarfed its
predecessor. This story arc was so
massive that it took two phone-book collections to contain it. Book
1 reprints issues #52-80, in which
Cerebus is elevated from Prime
Minister to Pope, due to the manipulations of the power brokers
of this complex society. Sim's comics world is layered and convoluted, mirroring the real world in its
subtleties, contradictions, and ambiguities. A lively debate on the
intricacies of Sim's devious tangle
of theologies is ongoing in the letter columns, and one of the beauties of the book is that it can be
thoroughly enjoyed on the surface
level, as well as afford a wealth of
buried treasure for those curious
and patient enough to do the excavating.

Occasionally Sim's graphic
and storytelling experiments are truly revolutionary, in particular, the "Mind
Game" issues (#20, #28, #63,
#156, and #157), wherein Cerebus
is thrust into a mysterious phantom world of disembodied objects
and voices. Issue #63 is a tour-de-force; Cerebus sits almost motionless in a self-pitying, drunken stupor, while his thoughts ﬂoat
around him like ghosts, a technique Sim brings to outrageous
full ﬂower in the current Rick's
Story storyline, wherein the
"good" and "bad" Cerebus personalities engage in an endless debate inside his head.

The look of Cerebus took another interesting turn in issue #65,
when Sim took on Gerhard as an
assistant to do backgrounds.
Gerhard soon grew to be a master
of pen-and-ink technique. Breath-
takingly detailed backgrounds
grace every page, complementing
Sim's well-drawn, expressive ﬁgures. Gerhard's work is so meticulous that he is known to have
built scale models of some of the
story settings, so as to guarantee
absolute consistency when viewed
at different angles in differing
lighting conditions. Sim has since
acknowledged Gerhard as a full
partner in every aspect of the project.

As in High Society, Church & State casts a cynical eye of the use
and abuse of power. Lord Julius
and Astoria surface again, and the
reader is never quite sure who is
pulling who's strings or to what
purpose. Cerebus seems to be at
the height of power but may be
nothing more than a pawn. As
usual, he abuses whatever authority is given to him.

Church & State Vol. 2 (reprinting #81-111) picks up with a
usurper dethroning Cerebus and
follows his efforts to undergo the
"ﬁnal ascension". Much of the religious conﬂict that had been simmering in the back of the series
comes to the fore here, and, as the
series approaches #100, Sim drops
humorous subplots and parodies
and builds up an enormous bubble
of tension which explodes in issues #99-102. In #102, Sim freezes
time at the instant of the previous
issue's climax, taking us on a tour of what is transpiring at that exact moment elsewhere to some of
his cast of characters.

No one will ever accuse
Dave Sim of being predictable. At the height of the
tension in Church & State, Sim
deﬂated it utterly. After a bit of
slapstick, the volume ends with
Cerebus on the moon, listening silently for several issues, as a character called The Judge expounds
on cosmology. Though many in the puzzled readership wondered if
Dave had ﬂipped, he was introducing material which would be
important thematically in the
next phase. We have since learned
that Sim has planned an intricate
architecture for the entire series,
that parts will presage, mirror, or
paraphrase the themes of other
parts.

Following the puzzling end of
Church & State, Sim began
Jaka's Story (#114-136). For someone of a literary bent, Jaka's Story
could serve as an interesting
jumping-on point for the series;
not only is the artwork exquisite,
but interspersed throughout is a
beautifully composed text story
concerning Jaka's childhood, written in the style of Oscar Wilde and
illustrated with lush, evocative.
large drawings.

Oscar himself is one of the
small cast of characters in this
story, as Cerebus takes refuge in
the home of his old ﬂame, Jaka, who is now married to the unmotivated Rick. Jaka dances nightly in
the tavern belonging to Pud, a lonely widower, and it is the interaction between these ﬁve characters that provides the meat of the
story. The counterpoint between
the cinematic telling of the ongoing story and the poetic flash-backs to Jaka's past is very effective.

Sim followed up the critically
acclaimed Jaka's Story with
what is perhaps his least
popular work, Melmoth (#139-
150). Whereas Jaka's Story focused on Cerebus and Jaka, who
stand at the heart of the story;
Melmoth threw readers for a loop by being, in essence, a retelling of the dismal last days of a dying Oscar Wilde. Readers were puzzled
by the fact that the dying Melmoth of this story seems to be an
older version of the Oscar of
Jaka's Story but is actually another character completely (or is he?).
Compounding this confusion was
the fact that the star of the series,
Cerebus, spends the length of this
novel in a daze, sitting passively,
clutching a rag doll, while the
world swirls around him. Sim
maintains that Melmoth is an integral part of the overall structure
of the work.

With Mothers & Daughters
(#151-200) Sim put Cerebus back
in the whirl of politics and religion. The new power to be reckoned
with is Cirin, the second aardvark
character to be introduced (we
knew from very early on that
there were three), and Cerebus is
an outcast in this world ruled by a
religious matriarchal tyranny.
The ﬁrst part is entitled Flight
(#151-162) and concerns itself
with an uprising against the oppressive Cirinists.

Cerebus is again being manipulated by higher powers, but this
time they seem to be godlike. A
host of baffling manifestations appear and, as is Sim's wont, are left
unexplained. But readers were
overjoyed, seeing in Mothers & Daughters a return to the sword-
wielding, angry Cerebus they
hadn't seen in quite a while. The
second volume, Women (#163-
174), gives us a closer view of life
under the Matriarchy.

Volume 3, Reads (#175-186), ﬁnds Sim at his most experimental, pushing the
limit of what can be considered a
comic book and also the boundary
between story content and editorial content. Much of Reads is pure
text: at ﬁrst the story of Victor
Reid, an author whose troubles
seem to mirror the plight of the
creator in today's comics industry.
Halfway through Reads, the text
becomes the voice of Victor Davis,
a thinly (if at all) disguised Dave
Sim. It was confusing for the
reader, since the kind of commentary Sim often made in his editorial pages was now appearing as part of the story. Was this fact or
ﬁction?

The amount of actual comic-book art in each issue had ebbed
and ﬂowed but reached its nadir
in issue #186, with only ﬁve pages
of art. This issue might go down
in history as one of the most controversial comics ever, because the
text section is Sim espousing a
worldview that is, to put it mildly,
inflammatory.

A firestorm of discussion (if you
can call it that) erupted throughout the comics media, from The
Comics Journal (which reviled
him on the cover) to the internet,
where the issue still hasn't sub-
sided.

The thread of the comics story
that ran through Reads was also
controversial, much of it consisting of a carefully choreographed
battle between two of the main
characters, very bloody, extremely
long, and in more detail than
many wanted to see. Sim even
threw in a disturbing revelation
about his protagonist.

Minds (#187-200) is the last
volume of Mothers & Daughters
and contains some of Sim's (and
Gerhard's) strongest work to date.
Minds has the appearance of pulling the curtain on many of the
themes that have run through the
series, and, even with 100 issues
left to go, it seems in some ways
to be an ending. Through most of
Minds, the focus is on Cerebus
alone, though Sim brings in another character whose impact is
unsettling. At the end, one is really left wondering: Where can he
go from here? As should be expected with Sim, the answer is totally
unexpected. Minds is expansive; its territory is the whole
Solar System and time itself.

The
next volume, Guys (#201-219),
brings the focus in tight, down to
a tavern where Cerebus and a
host of fellas (and a few gals) are
engaged in the sport of -- well,
whatever it is that goes on in taverns. Sim uses this very limited
setting to introduce a whole new
vocabulary of cartooning techniques, making what could have
been a monotonous sequence a
veritable orgy of creativity.

The biggest creative break-through here is Sim's use of word
balloons and lettering, pushing
their use in many new direction.
Sim also pushes the use of heavily
accented dialogue to the limit; essentially much of this dialogue
must be read out loud to get to the
bottom of what the characters are
saying. Much of the humor in
Guys consists of in jokes, since
most of the patrons of this tavern
are thinly disguised parodies of
other self-published comics characters.

As of this writing, Sim is up to
part ﬁve of Rick's Story (#220-
231). Readers who want to sample
Cerebus but don't feel ambitious
enough to hunt down any phone
books or back issues may ﬁnd that
picking up the new issue of Rick's
Story is all they need to get
hooked.

2 comments:

I jumped on with Jaka's story which was an excellent place to start at the time because the biweekly reprints came along very soon afterwards, so I could keep up and catch up at the same time. A very fortuitous time. Why did I buy Jaka's Story? The lovely cover art AND the fact that it had a no. 1 on the cover!Eric FennesseySomewhere in England

I almost started with Jaka's Story. I remember seeing the cover to...I think it was number five. I figured, well, I've already missed the first four issues, I'll just wait until this storyline is over and then read the next one. I mean, it's already at number five, he's probably almost done, how long could it be...